Logging continues to fragment Swift parrot breeding habitat in Tasmania
Logging has kept cutting through Swift parrot breeding forest south of Hobart, even after a court injunction and a Supreme Court fight over the habitat.
Logging has continued to cut into Swift parrot breeding habitat in Tasmania, including a forest south of Hobart that Bob Brown Foundation says is critical to the endangered bird’s recovery. The foundation’s January 2024 report, Logging Swift Parrots to extinction: The 2023/24 Crisis Report, said Forestry Tasmania was still carrying out logging in breeding habitat of the critically endangered Swift Parrot, Lathamus discolor.
The legal pressure has been building around that same patch of forest. On January 31, 2024, a temporary injunction was ordered to stop logging there while the case played out, after Bob Brown Foundation argued the area was breeding habitat for the bird. By August 22, 2024, the foundation called its Supreme Court case against Forestry Tasmania a “great outcome for Swift Parrots and their habitat,” but it still said logging continued.
The broader policy fight has moved just as fast as the court action. On September 5, 2024, Environmental Justice Australia said the fate of Australia’s rare and precious Swift Parrot “hangs in the balance” after decades of logging in the Tasmanian forests where it lives, and argued that Regional Forest Agreements have left native forest logging exempt from national environment law. That exemption is now central to the accountability fight, because it leaves habitat protection vulnerable even as the species remains listed as critically endangered.
BirdLife Australia has also pressed the same point from another angle, saying Tasmanian government logging plans were uncovered and that swift parrot recovery planning has been undermined. In one social media post snippet, the group said there were as few as 750 left in the wild. In another, it said public habitat was being “knowingly destroyed” by logging because governments had failed to manage the threat.
The science has continued to catch up with what campaigners have been saying for years. A paper in Nature Scientific Reports, titled Quantifying forest degradation, deforestation and land use change in vital swift parrot breeding habitat, was published on March 12, 2025, adding measurable evidence that the loss is not abstract. For Swift parrots, the bottleneck is the breeding forest itself, and every new cut in Tasmania narrows the room left for recovery.
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